Another reason I dislike Microsoft

http://ajax.asp.net

Hooray, welcome to the Ajax world ASP.NET. It's been around long enough, someone bright in Redmond actually started the movement back in the mid 90's. But, Microsoft, could you not kill the term by branding your Ajax components as AjaxThisOrThat when it's really just a wrapper for DHTML functionality? It appears to me that you're trying to capitalize on the current wave by simply naming DHTML controls as Ajaxed controls. Which is simply wrong. Then again, I suppose that's no surprise considering your failed attempt at changing the meanings of things anyway.

Sadly, for the ASP.NET developers who may be new to it, they'll now be dumbed down (once again?) to the real concepts and essentials of what Ajax _really_ is and how/why it works.

Oh, and nice job on making it only work with web services and kudos to making configuration a breeze.

Quote model, has_many and a couple hours of grief

I have two models, Quote and QuoteLineItem using the has_many and belongs_to respectively. I was having issues with AR dumping out insert statements like

INSERT INTO quote_line_items (`created_on`, `quote_id`, `price`, `modified_on`, `product_id`, `quantity`, `modified_by_person_id`) VALUES(#<Quote:0x36551f0>,
#<Quote:0x364dba8>, #<Quote:0x3645728>, #<Quote:0x363efa4>, #<Quote:0x362ef3c>, #<Quote:0x3636728>, #<Quote:0x3624618>))

This drove me nuts so I jumped into rdebug to figure out the issue. Turns out there is an ActiveRecord method name collision when using

belongs_to :quote

so you have to provide an alternative, something like

belongs_to :related_quote, :class_name => "Quote"

Wish I knew that when I was creating this migration....

UPDATE:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/4248

Spotlight and indexed content

UPDATE: Check it out: http://www.arcadianvisions.com/downloads/RubyImporter.html

Became apparent to me today as I was searching for some files that Spotlight only indexes content for files based on their extension (and plugin, if installed). I was able to confirm this with the following code:

echo "hello you hoser" > something.java
mdls something.java

There's a bunch of data there associated specifically to the .java extension. Find that file based on its contents:

mdfind "you hoser" |grep java

Aha, there's the file.
Trying this again with, say, a .rb extension:

echo "take off you nob" > somethingelse.rb
mdfind "take off you" | grep something

No results. mdls shows that there are some attributes associated with the .rb extension, but somehow the content isn't indexed.

XCode provides a project template called "Metadata Importer" so you can write your own to deal with custom extensions. Apple's doc explains the process.

quicksilver shortcut for locking the screen in OSX

I copied the ScreenSaverEngine.app from System/Library/Frameworks/Screensaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
to a cataloged QuickSilver directory. From there I just bound a key through the Triggers. Now I can lock the machine with ctl-option-l.

Suse 10.2 64-bit and VMWare Server

Need a 64-bit server so we can run our VMWare machines on it and utilize the 8+ gig of RAM. Originally tried CentOS but because VMWare Server is compiled against 32-bit libraries, it would be a nasty amount of work to install the needed libraries one-by-one (ldd spit out at least 20 libraries we needed). After digging around online it turns out that VMWare "officially" supports Suse but not much else. Time was of the essence and we bagged Gentoo for that reason.

The 10.1 install was pleasant, but the user experience was very unpleasant. I didn't actually install it, but a coworker did and it was only a matter of days until he migrated to Ubuntu. We were hoping that some of the usability issues were resolved in 10.2, happy to report that is the case. We installed the base system, developer libraries, kernel development and the 32-bit libraries during the initial package selection. After that, once the system was up and running, vmware installed without issue.

To use vnc (via ssh) we enabled Remote Login in Login Window Preferences (not sure why that's a System Application but not in the Control Center). The command to enable port forwarding for local vncviewer execution is "ssh -g -L localhost:5901:machine:5901 user@machine -X", then "vncviewer localhost::5901" will connect right up through that ssh tunnel (also, ssh with the -g enables anyone to use your tunnel).